I've mentioned in a number of blog entries that I consider non-root installation and operation of ITNM to be "Best Practice". One area where the "Out of the box" ITNM product doesn't support this are the system startup scripts. These are the scripts thar reside in /etc/init.d (the path varies slightly by *NIX variant). Of course it you are running the ITNM installer as a non-root user, the installer won't be able to put scripts in the protected system directory, but it will still create versions in $NCHOME/precision/custom/control/init.d. The three scripts it creates are:

ncp - The startup script for all of the "core" precision processes

nco - The startup script for OMNIbus processes

tip - The startup script for the Tivoli Integrated Portal

N.B. These scripts are built as part of the process of building and customizing the various ITNM control scripts (e.g itnm_start, itnm_status, and so forth.) There is a master script, $NCHOME/precision/install/scripts/create_all_control.sh that does this - it's easy to figure out the chain of subordinate scripts from there.

The problem with the stock startup scripts is that they provide no mechanism for starting their process as something other than root. I have added that feature to the scripts along with a few other improvements. You can get them: here. (UPDATE 1/23/13 - Fixed export of NC_RULES_HOME in the "nco" script.)

These scripts can be run both by the root user (either at startup or later) or by the user reserved to be the owner of the ITNM processes (I use "netcool" unless my customer provisioned a different name.)

EDIT: One more thing to note - these startup scripts do require the ITNM control scripts to be present (which is not the default if the server only has OMNIbus stuff). Here's how to fix that.

EDIT: And another thing to remember - Change the modes to r_xr_x_r_x after copying them to the appropriate startup directory, and don't forget to make the appropriate symlinks.For example, installing the nco script on Linux would be done like: